Electrical Engineer's Work May Signal Better Wireless Connections

Aria Nosratinia, associate head of the electrical engineering department in the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Texas at Dallas, is investigating the technology that keeps us connected.

Credit: UT Dallas News Center

The U.S. National Science Foundation has awarded University of Texas at Dallas (UT Dallas) researchers three grants totaling more than $2 million to investigate wireless communications technology.

The first grant, a $608,000 award, will support a cross-disciplinary project with University of Hawaii researchers. "We aim to develop methods that break the wireless messages into microstreams, or smaller pieces, enabling them to be transmitted through--rather than against--other signals in the environment," says UT Dallas professor Aria Nosratinia.

A $421,000 grant will be used to expand on a previous discovery made at UT Dallas involving the behavior of wireless channels. "This new discovery provides a new set of tools to address the challenges of transmission in a wireless medium, and therefore improves the quality of wireless communication," Nosratinia says.

The third award, for about $1.13 million, will help investigate the risks associated with malicious hardware modifications, known as hardware Trojans. "These risks have increased as the different stages of design and manufacturing are now done by different firms that are scattered across various countries and continents," Nosratinia says.

In addition, he is working on a project to find efficient coding methods for the wireless channel, especially in the presence of interference.